Matters were at this point when the “Origin of Species” appeared.  The weighty sentence, “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” (1st edition page 488), was not only in full harmony with the conclusions at which I had arrived respecting the structural relations of apes and men, but was strongly supported by them.  And inasmuch as Development and Vertebrate Anatomy were not among Mr. Darwin’s many specialities, it appeared to me that I should not be intruding on the ground he had made his own, if I discussed this part of the general question.  In fact, I thought that I might probably serve the cause of Evolution by doing so.

Some experience of popular lecturing had convinced me that the necessity of making things clear to uninstructed people was one of the very best means of clearing up the obscure corners in one’s own mind.  So, in 1860, I took the Relation of Man to the lower Animals for the subject of the six lectures to working men which it was my duty to deliver.  It was also in 1860 that this topic was discussed before a jury of experts at the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, and from that time a sort of running fight on the same subject was carried on, until it culminated at the Cambridge Meeting of the Association in 1862, by my friend Sir W. Flower’s public demonstration of the existence in the apes of those cerebral characters which had been said to be peculiar to man.

[The famous Oxford Meeting of 1860 was of no small importance in Huxley’s career.  It was not merely that he helped to save a great cause from being stifled under misrepresentation and ridicule—­that he helped to extort for it a fair hearing; it was now that he first made himself known in popular estimation as a dangerous adversary in debate—­a personal force in the world of science which could not be neglected.  From this moment he entered the front fighting line in the most exposed quarter of the field.

Most unluckily, no contemporary account of his own exists of the encounter.  Indeed, the same cause which prevented his writing home the story of the day’s work nearly led to his absence from the scene.  It was known that Bishop Wilberforce, whose first class in mathematics gave him, in popular estimation, a right to treat on scientific matters, intended to “smash Darwin”; and, Huxley, expecting that the promised debate would be merely an appeal to prejudice in a mixed audience, before which the scientific arguments of the Bishop’s opponents would be at the utmost disadvantage, intended to leave Oxford that very morning and join his wife at Hardwicke, near Reading, where she was staying with her sister.  But in a letter, quoted below, he tells how, on the Friday afternoon, he chanced to meet Robert chambers, the reputed author of the “Vestiges of Creation,” who begged him “not to desert them.”  Accordingly he postponed his departure; but seeing his wife next morning, had no occasion to write a letter.